Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 22, 2010 @06:03PM
from the pesky-agents-of-the-f-b-i dept.

coondoggie writes "An FBI investigation has led a Michigan couple to be charged with stealing hybrid car information from GM to use in a Chinese auto outfit. A federal indictment charged Yu Qin, aka Yu Chin, 49, and his wife, Shanshan Du, aka Shannon Du, 51, of Troy, Michigan with conspiracy to possess trade secrets without authorization, unauthorized possession of trade secrets, and wire fraud. One of the individuals was also charged with obstruction of justice, said Barbara McQuade, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan in a statement. GM estimates that the value of the stolen documents is over $40 million."

Buick is the best selling foreign make in China, but still less than 6% of the market, so I'd not even consider that a foothold. More like a toe in the water. The vast majority of Chinese vehicles are made in China. But I was surprised by the Buick presence as well, I saw more things like the Honda Fit running around as foreign makes.

The "L" and "R" sounds in Chinese are different than in English (or don't exist?), so Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing English words with those sounds in. That's the joke (look at the names he listed again).

English speakers have a similar difficulty with Scottish Gaelic words, because Gaelic has 3 different "L" sounds and 3 different "R" sounds (used to have 4, but one has been dropped). They get a bit tongue-tied when trying to pronounce these words.

I assume that you are unaware of how important the Chinese market is for GM. Here is a recent article about it: China sales overtake U.S. for first time [suntimes.com]. Chinese car companies don't have to come over here, they can hurt GM at home.

And $40 million dollars doesn't seem unreasonable. That's only about 2000 vehicles at average US prices.

And we're idiots for doing it. The Chinese have no intention of letting American companies profit from their investments in China. Now that they've dragged themselves out of the impoverished, subsistence farming society that they've been stuck in as recently as the 1970s, they're going to do their damndest to ensure that the only people who profit from the newly emergent Chinese middle class are Chinese businesses.

Also, please note in the second and third paragraphs how they urge congress to kill the "Buy American" clause in the federal economic stimulus plan.

They were quite successful in effectively killing it, although the media, including the Bretton Woods Committee, reported that it was simply "watered down." (More on that later.)
And who is the Bretton Woods Committee?

Officially, they are an economics group promoting widespread knowledge of the

They have 6x the number of research papers because they give grants to the people who write the most papers without regard for quality. The result is for every legitimate paper, there's 100 that are outright wrong, plagarized (we know their ideas about sharing information), or don't have any original research.

On a serious note, green technologies are one of the few things the West are doing better than the East right now. We can't sell them manufactured goods, they've already cornered that market, and they're at least as close if not edging ahead on banking and perhaps even IT. Anything that relies on IP is a non-starter. Do you didn't think western governments were suddenly supporting green technologies because it's the right thing to do, or because it's one of the few things we have of value right now (not to

Get back to me in 20 years. My whole family bought all GM, for many years. Then they screwed my dad, that was the end of it. We all now drive toyotas. When their upfront quality and quality 10-15 years later on those cars is good then we can see about buying them again.

Hybrids are a bit of a joke, efficiency wise so I have my doubts about a domestic market for them in China. But Chinese car makers could compete with the Japanese, etc in the export market. But you'd expect that they would get found out. Maybe the immediate objective was to sell a complete system within china and let the buyer take the rap for the stolen tech.

I've owned a 2006 Civic Hybrid for the past four years and calculate the savings based on my driving habits and the cost of gas every year. It recouped its cost over a year ago and has currently saved me well over $1000. It also pollutes less. So...why is this a joke?

Be careful. A Gallon in the US is 20% smaller than an imperial gallon, but a mile is the same distance. So to compare, either do the conversion or use metric. The European models are more efficient, but not by as big a margin as it might first appear.

Except if you're calculating the savings based on cost of gas and driving habits alone, you're missing a major part of the equation. Did you include the $23000 it cost you to buy a new car, as opposed to continuing to maintain/repair and feed gas into your old one? Or if this was your very first car, did you do the calculations for getting a cheap used car vs new car, and take the price difference into account?

If you absolutely had to get a new car, did you look a the 2006 Civic -- 10-12k cheaper than the Hybrid, with gas mileage that's not appreciably worse? Did you take into account that 10-12k price difference in your calculations?

When you look at the miles you drive without taking into account the base cost, you're only seeing part of the picture needed to determine if you recouped your cost. And unless you drive a 40-50k miles a year, your costs have not been recouped. (I did a breakdown of the math in a comment some time back, and showed that it would take gas in the range of $8-9/gallon to recoup costs over a five year period at 12k a year; or $5-6/gallon to recoup them if you assumed you had to buy a new car and calculated based on price difference.)

Of course, the GX is missing a lot of things that the Hybrid has standard - like an automatic transmission, [...] and power windows.

Hell, I'd pay extra NOT to have either of those. Why do you think people are buying new cars every five years? Because the crappy power window motor goes out, and the cost of getting a mechanic to replace one is astronomical. If you're a bit mechanically inclined, you can replace them yourself with after-market parts, but it's certainly hard, time-consuming work. Meanwhile,

Guess what? It's almost ALWAYS cheaper to keep an old car that's serviceable. Gas is too cheap and cars are too expensive. That applies to hybrids and non-hybrids alike.

Fair point. These really are too different issues.

Price compared to hybrid: you're mostly right, the price range as 14,360 -$23,350; I misread. So it was 9k instead of 10k; that doesn't fundamentally change anything.

When you make up your numbers, compare cars that aren't comparable, ignore the used hybrid market, or compare a used vehicle to a new hybrid, it's very easy to make hybrids look much more expensive than they are. It's also misleading and dishonest.

You raise a valid point in that the comparisons weren't apples-to-apples. So let's look at some hard numbers by comparing two comparable models of 2006 Honda Civic, bought at Kelly Blue Book values and using current gas prices.

Ugh. "two" different issues... (though I guess technically "too different issues" is almost valid, if I'd included a hyphen... (here, let me me use more ellipses... (maybe it's time to go to sleep...)) )

The joke is that hybrids get no more mileage than TDIs, but have a higher initial energy cost of production, and a higher initial monetary cost, AND a higher recycling cost, while their fuel (gasoline) takes more energy to produce than diesel fuel. If non-plug-in gas hybrids are the answer then the question was fucking stupid. No matter how you slice it, a hybrid is NOT the most efficient solution readily available on the market today.

The debunking needs a debunking, not because the "Dust to Dust" report isn't based on false assumptions, but because it makes unfounded statements. Nobody is really clear on what recycling of hybrids will really be like en masse because their recycling has only just begun. However it is simply true that it takes more energy to produce or recycle a hybrid than a vehicle without the electric motive system, and they get no better mileage than a TDI. They have nominally better emissions than a modern turbodiese

Right. Because manufacturing isn't dirty. And construction isn't dirty. And transportation isn't dirty. Newsflash: You can have processes that aren't that environmentally friendly, but with proper toxin containment and material handling procedures, still operate in an environmentally responsible way.

Hybrids are a bit of a joke, efficiency wise so I have my doubts about a domestic market for them in China.

Hybrids are pretty damn impressively efficient if applied to a medium-small vehicle used mainly in city and near-by suburbs. The joke is when you try to apply the same concept to a huge SUV. Or when the majority of your driving is out of the cities. One size does not fit all.

But you'd expect that they would get found out.

How? I'll remind a lot of readers here that these "secrets" are not always a

A hybrid on the open road has similar performance and similar economy to a car with the same size gasoline engine. There's an ability to make the gasoline engine smaller because the electric motor boosts the "feel" of the acceleration. But if you compare a 1.5 l with a 1.5 l and one's hybrid and one's not, you won't see a difference in performance on the open road (assuming the same engine, the one in the Prius is tuned for economy over performance, and many 1.5 l engines will be more tuned for power than

This story is tagged "patents", but it's not about patents. The copied data was a trade secret. Patents are by definition publicly published information. Trade secrets are different. Patents are easily abusable government monopolies that often violate free speech. Actual industrial secrets are essential to remaining competitive, as this case demonstrates. It's cheaper, faster and less risky for a Chinese (or any other) corporation to copy the data that GM (or anyone else) produced over a period of time and at a significant cost, than it is for that competitor to produce its own. The secret was violated by violating agreements and other deception.

Would it? My understanding is that patents makes it illegal to use the technology in anything in the marketplace. My university has a bachelor-level course where they clean up a protein which is quite expensive because of a patent. They end up throwing away 1000's of dollars worth of it every year as they aren't allowed to sell it. As long as they don't sell it (or give it away, or...), they are allowed to follow the patent, though.

If the situation is the same with software patents, you are allowed to writ

Patents include control of making the item. Perhaps there is a special license for them for educational use, or perhaps they think that "fair use" or some such applies to patents (it doesn't) or perhaps they think you aren't in violation unless you sell or distribute it. Regardless, they are violating the patent, even in an educational setting, to make a patented item (unless so licensed).

From what I see, this is what happened. They worked as engineers at GM and they were let go. Du then copied her work files and then started a company where they used the GM files to further their company. They probably rationalized that since they had worked on the project, they had a right to use it for their personal company.

I've heard variants of this in a few places. There was a software company who let a few engineers go but they started a competitive business with the code they had worked on but did

That book doesn't really say Trade Secrets are illegitimate. It says the legal action against the third-party to whom the "breaker" would be selling the secrets to is questionable, but then justifies it because "it could be argued that the competitor Y is acting in conspiracy with or as an accomplice of employee A to violate the (contractual) rights of trade secret holder X."

I don't get your point. Are you saying Y should be able to get away with using data obtained by a breach of contract of A? Then even i

Risking jail time for a 'trade secret' (which seems to carry more weight than national secrets that might be protecting lives) seems to somewhat pointless. Why not just wait until GM implements whatever super-secret-mega-tech in a vehicle and then reverse engineer it? Once GM 'publish' it in this form without patent protection it seems to me it is fair game.

You think the Russians had spies? They're nothing compared to the Chinese.

This is not individual actors out for their own gain, this is a concerted effort over the last 30 years to get China on par with the latest tech, by hook or crook.

While there's nothing wrong with that per-se, the thing that everyone seems to be ignoring is that China is not an open society and all this maneuvering is to get more Geopolitical Power for the Communist Party. A non-representative, totalitarian regime bent on imposing its will across the region and the world. People assume once China is "caught up" they'll follow international rules and "play fair". This is a fairy tale, they are out to dominate.. and will take whatever steps necessary to make sure that happens, economic or military. Their own population is just a tool towards this endgame.

Ever wonder how Pakistan got nukes? China.

Wonder how North Korea got nukes through Pakistan? China made the intro.That way, their hands were clean but they were able to create a permanent buffer zone on the Korean peninsula and pre-empt any German equivalent of reunification which would put a functioning democracy on their doorstep.

China is playing a dangerous game and people who think prosperity will make them fat and happy are completely mistaken.. the economy is a tool for them both to placate their population and to wield as a weapon on the international stage.

If I recall correctly we busted the Russians good. They stole some oil pipeline control software, and we knew they were going to steal it. So we wrote in some malware and a few months later, boom, one of their pipelines explodes because of said malware. The Japanese let the Chinese steal a design for bad capacitors which ended up in everyone's electronics. Perhaps we should let them have a design for a car who's doors weld themselves closed and then the engine catches fire.

So, they are being charged with a total of 40 years jail time and $750K in fines for information worth 40 million?

The 40 years is definitely nasty, but looking at the 750K, I've gotta think.. that's like 3 dollars worth of mp3's if they had them online. Seems like GM would get a better deal by getting them charged with copyright infringement per page stolen.

Asians eh? Warning, you prejudice might be showing. I'm an "Asian" but I am not offended by your comment. This is because, until very recently in human history, copying what others created is the norm. Be it in language, music, food, vehicles or weapons. You after all got the Chinese to thank for gunpowder, among other things. I don't recall Europeans paying the Chinese any royalties on that.

Asians eh? Warning, you prejudice might be showing. I'm an "Asian" but I am not offended by your comment. This is because, until very recently in human history, copying what others created is the norm.

From this assertion one might rationally conclude that the Chinese have failed to apprehend the modern world. One could also argue that they understand it better than the rest of us. Your argument, thus, adds nothing whatsoever to the conversation.

I hate to break it to you but all humans copy. If you believe otherwise you're either delusional or racist.

There are, however, cultural difference. Westerners tend to be more subtle, or at least they try to convince you that what they've copied is somehow different. No doubt the fear of lawsuits factors into this, especially for Americans.

Chinese tend to have a win-at-any-cost attitude. If that means copying, so be it. Also, keep in mind that many, if not most, Chinese can't afford all the popular stuff we